VS Code and Positron

Air provides first class support for both VS Code and Positron, which both support the Language Server Protocol.

Installation

Air is available as an Extension for both VS Code and Positron. The extension comes pre-bundled with an Air binary, so you don’t need anything else to get going! The Air extension is hosted in the VS Code Marketplace and on OpenVSX.

Features

Format on save

Once you have the extension installed, turn on Format on Save for R documents by opening your settings.json and adding:

{
    "[r]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    }
}

You should now be able to simply open an R document, save it, and have the entire document formatted by Air. You can also explicitly call the command Format Document if you’d like to control this manually.

Format selection

To format a selection of code, highlight it with your cursor and run the command Format Selection. Formatting a selection may expand that selection to find the nearest complete fragment of code that is formattable.

Format workspace folder

Air ships with a special Air: Format Workspace Folder command to format all R files within a workspace folder. This is particularly useful when transitioning an existing project over to Air, where you need to perform a project-wide format before utilizing the per-file format on save feature.

Note that if you don’t have an air.toml in your project, then this command will use Air’s default settings rather than the IDE settings synchronization mechanism. We recommend using usethis::use_air() to set up an air.toml (among other things) before running this command.

Quarto

Quarto can automatically invoke Air on R code cells when the Quarto extension is active.

Format on save

To format all R code cells on save, set this in your settings.json:

{
    "[quarto]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    },
    "[r]": {
        "editor.formatOnSave": true
    }
}

Format cell

When inside an R cell in a Quarto document, use the chorded key combination Cmd+K Cmd+F or the command Quarto: Format Cell to format a single cell.

Configuration autocompletion and validation

Installing the Even Better TOML extension activates autocompletion and validation while inside an air.toml file. There is a known issue regarding autocompletion duplication, but we still find this extension very useful!